The Village of Waiting by Packer George

Author:Packer, George [Packer, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466894495
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2015-08-31T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Three Africas

Ouagadougou

The road to Ouagadougou is long from any Direction, and flat and empty. As far as you can see the earth stretches out, cracked and dry, like a vast, browning jigsaw puzzle. Coming up from the south in a bush taxi, as I did, you reach a fork in the road: one sign points left, Ouagadougou 140, and the other right, Niamey 560. Though the distance is in kilometers, not miles, the thought of attempting Niamey makes the head float.

The “rainy” season had begun to spit, and every few miles we passed a water hole where a farmer leaned on a stick while his cows drank. Sometimes it was no more than a mud flat. A donkey, or a woman shrunk like a raisin, hauled firewood across an empty stretch of land. Here and there a village—half a dozen tan blocks with window niches—seemed cut out of a bump in the earth. And under every baobab tree a soldier sat on a motorcycle, his beret a brilliant flash of red. Eight hours, eleven baobabs, eleven soldiers, eleven passport checks.

A sickly little Voltaic in a woolen cap who was sleeping and sweating on my shoulder during the ride had an expired identity card. We waited at the first baobab for half an hour while the soldier and the man, suddenly come to life, argued over bribe money and finally cut a deal. The next few soldiers grew bored and stopped checking just before they got to him. As the taxi roared off he would allow a wry grin amid the congratulations of the other passengers. Between stops he seemed about to die on me again; and I remembered a story of a man who died on a bus that had to carry the corpse a hundred miles to the next town. The fifth or sixth soldier under the fifth or sixth baobab wanted more money than the man was willing to pay. Eventually we left him there, and as we drove off I looked out the back of the truck. They were standing by the motorcycle under the tree, the big soldier with the red beret and the little man with the woolen cap, not looking at each other, miles from anything, growing tiny. I doubted he would ever get to Ouagadougou and I wondered which would kill him first: fever, corruption, or sheer distance.

The Sahel used to be the cultivatable underbelly of the Sahara, its water and soil capable of supporting village life. Years of erosion and desertification and the three-year drought had begun to make life here untenable; the desert was moving south. But the peasants who hadn’t migrated to Ouagadougou, the Ivory Coast, or France continued to scratch at the ground and draw their jug of water, their jar of millet. Every year the women had to go farther out to scavenge the night’s fuel wood. It seemed bleaker than desert, where nothing was expected to grow and the Tuaregs lived as nomadic herdsmen. Here the

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